NW Voices

A few months after I started writing Crooked River, I signed up for a Backyard Beekeeping class through Portland Community College. The first part of the class was a lecture on the basics of beekeeping and the equipment needed to start a new hive. Later the class met at the instructor/beekeeper’s house a few minutes’ …

As the dawn brightens outside my sod igloo, I see the ground is white. The trees are waving madly in a snowstorm. For a second, I feel my heart beat faster—yesterday was warm and sunny, and this morning I have to set off for Tacoma and the PNBA book conference. It won’t be pleasant in a blizzard. …

If I could give every teenager in the world one thing, it would be J-Hall. When I was in high school, J-Hall was my haven. The nerds ruled J-Hall. It housed the band, choir, and theater departments, and at the end of the hall, far from the clamor of the crowded cafeteria, sat a magical …

I grew up in the mountains of central Idaho, near the Frank Church Wilderness of No Return. My parents could probably be classified as being part of the back to the land movement. Soon after my older sister was born, they moved from a suburb of Denver to Idaho and bought a piece of land …

The Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) building, once a former naval training center, sits alongside South Lake Union in Seattle. The museum is filled with fascinating, engaging collections from all time periods to browse. I’ve taken my third graders on a field trip, I’ve passed through while on my bike commute home, and I’ve …

Writing groups. Some of us love them. Some of us hate them. I would never have completed my novel, The Gods of Second Chances, without having collaborated with fellow writers almost every week. Our group sets the expectation for me to bring pages. Spot on critiques led to multiple revisions of my manuscript. But while …

When I was eleven years old, the local bowling alley and movie theater were torn down to make room for a mall expansion called “The Village.” The mall, up to that point, had been a typical suburban mall in Canada, albeit a large one, with a bulk grocery store and two department stores, a tailor …

People bring my husband gifts. He’s a mechanic who for decades has run a little garage in Port Townsend, and his customers love him. No, I mean they really love him, in the way mothers indulge sons and spinster ladies used to dote on their young pastors. They bake pies, drop off vegetables from their …

51 a. According to recent census numbers, Spokane, Washington is a city of 209,000 in a county of 476,000 in a metropolitan area of roughly 670,000. b. I am roughly one of those people. c. Almost five years ago, I wrote a now comically out-of-date essay (or was it a short …

Receiving a book award for a book without any words was a bit of a surprise and has left me slightly uneasy. It is not as though I think of my book The Great War – a 24-sheet foldout illustration depicting the Battle of the Somme – as unworthy of attention and enormous sales. It …